Daily Archive: November 21, 2013

I use this remote to control the lights in our bedroom, so far I have used two out of three and both remotes works well. I also want to credit the manufacturer for including a battery in the remote controller and saying so in it’s description of the product. I had a remote, different brand, the same packaging, three socket oulets and one remote. Two out of the three remote socket oulets failed in just over a year. So I am keeping my fingers crossed how long this brand would last.

I didn’t have any issues with the battery compartment on the remote, as some of the other reviewers did, and I’m not trying to control anything through the wall so range hasn’t been an issue. My biggest complaint is that the outlet boxes are obscenely large, and the plug is oriented such that if you’re plugging this directly into a wall socket, it will block both outlets. Also note that they require 3-prong outlets, so if you’re thinking about using a multitap extension cord, it will have to be 3-pronged as well. This may work best plugged into something like a PowerSquid.

The only draw back for this particular style is that the units are very large. They have been used daily for many months now and have worked beautifully. Some reviews mentioned the difficulty in putting in the batteries and I would have to agree.

The newer models allow you to program each socket to respond to any of the buttons on the two remotes provided. The instructions that came with the device are very poorly written. Poor English in some cases and incomplete instructions. There is no explanation of how to ‘un-program’ a button, and I was finding it impossible to get the two remotes to replicate one another. In some applications you want to program the remotes to control different devices, but in what I believe is the more common application you want the remotes to functional identically. If I program button number 1 on remote A, I want button number 1 on remote B to control the same socket. I would setup one remote, and then when I went to duplicate the process for the second remote some of the buttons stopped working on the first remote and vice-versa.

I reached out to customer support via email and got a quick response. The customer service rep (Tyler) was very helpful and informed me that each socket can only remember up to 3 buttons. So as soon as I tried programming a 4th button to a socket that had already been associated with 3 other buttons, it removed the association for one of the 3 previous buttons. Each button sends out a specific frequency. 5 different frequencies for buttons 1-5 on remote A, and another 5 frequencies for each of the buttons on remote B.

I explained that this is the setup I wanted, and that I wanted all buttons on both remotes A and B to behave identically. They are all hooked up to various lamps in my kids’ bedroom.